Christopher Eric Hitchens (born 13 April 1949, died 15 December 2011) was an English-American author and journalist whose books, essays and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. He was a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation and Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. In 2005, he was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.

He was best known in recent times for his strong and vocal opposition to religion. Demonstrated, among other places, in his 2007 book god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everythingnote In Britain the book was published with subtitle "The Case Against Religion". Note that the title uses a lowercase "g", though this is sometimes not noticed., and he is considered to be a founder of the "New Atheism" movement.

Although admired for his speaking and writing, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who could always agree with him. Hitchens began his political career as a socialist, but broke with the left in the 1990s. He began to moderate his views on economic policy and promote interventionist foreign policy, which sometimes led to him being called a neoconservative, even though he was hardly a political conservative. He supported the Iraq War and never regretted it, but in contrast to the neoconservative camp, he was critical of Israel. Many of his stances came as a result of his opposition to fundamentalist religion.

He died in a Houston hospital on December 15, 2011 from complications relating to oesophageal cancer.

His work provides examples of:

Accentuate the Negative: Unsurprisingly, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything focuses on the negative aspects of religion.

""It will happen to all of that at some point you'll be tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party is over, but slightly worse: the party's going on but you have to leave."

Devil's Advocate: Literally. When the matter of raising Mother Teresa to sainthood was raised, Hitchens was brought into argue against it (he described the experience as "working for the Devil pro bono").

Fake Ultimate Hero: How Hitch saw and described in his writings many revered figures, most notably Mother Teresa, widely viewed as a saint.

"[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction."

Fan Nickname: When Hitchens made a particularly good point or refutation, it was often referred to as a "Hitchslap". Hitchens himself is sometimes referred to as 'Hitch', including in the title of his memoir, Hitch-22.

For Science!: He agreed to be subjected to waterboarding for a Vanity Fair article. It did not take long for him to activate the dead-man's switch and have it stop.

"To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery."

I Take Offence To That Last One: When George Galloway said to Hitchens "You're a drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay", he replied "Only some of which is true". He later explained that he was very definitely an ex-Trotskyist, was quite probably a popinjay (meaning either a fop or, archaically, a frequent target) but was an expert at holding his liquor.

Just for Pun: His treatise on Mother Theresa, "The Missionary Position".

Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: He claimed in his books and lectures that religion in general is ultimately a dangerous and destructive organization, and that a religion-free world would be much better.

"All religious belief is sinister and infantile."

Sibling Yin-Yang: With his younger brother Peter, a convert to Christianity and opponent of the Iraq war. They were estranged for a time but eventually reconciled and engaged in a number of public debates on religion.

Sophisticated as Hell: As a master of polemic, it's hardly surprising. When giving a speech or lecture, he was not afraid to use a juicy expression.

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